Final Words

Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space.

Medfield (left 1) vs. Moorestown (right 2)

The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core. GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version of Medfield to rectify this problem.

Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem.

Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very interesting disruptions in the market.

While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this goes in the next 12 months...

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163 Comments

No i dont doubt Anands Integrity or his benchmarks, i have just questioned his optimistic assuptions on un proven Intel hardware, especially when Intel produced the scope and the power benchmarks.

All of which compare last years hardware, all the Intel sorced benches are single threaded and are likely due to Intel software optimisations, and lastly because the atom is higher clocked.The benches as exophase has pointed out are on things that the cpu is not loaded/stressed.

Its great he has provided us with an insight, but this in no way proves that this architecture is the best nor does it prove that it would have 'dominated' android devices last year for a whole number of reasons that i cant be bothered to re-type.

Time for the haters to eat their words, and the ARM supporters to admit they were wrong.

On the forums there were enough self-proclaimed "experts" that claimed Intel was doomed and that ARM would take over. Well who's laughing now? Here we see an Atom SoC, that has power characteristics EQUAL or BETTER THAN ARM SoCs, while posting very strong performance as well. This is keeping in mind that it is just the first step for Intel in the smartphone market.

ARM supporters are already claiming that Medfield only looks good because it's being compared to year-old ARM designs. But guess what, the Atom design is 5 years old! Yes, this is a new SoC for Intel, but the fact is Intel must be given HUGE credit that they were able to make an SoC based on the 5-year old Atom design that is extremely competitive in power and performance to ARM SoCs.

Next-gen ARM designs will arrive later this year yes, but Intel will not stand still either. Also lets not forget about the next-gen Atom that will come in 2013 on the 22nm process. That will be a HUGE leap forward for Intel and will put them in an extremely competitive position against any quad-core ARM SoCs. Reply

Except that Medfield is built on a 32nm process while ALL available A9s out there are built on the 45nm process. If the A9's were 32nm as well these benchmarks would be very different and these benchmarks came straight from intel, lets way wait till we actually get the phone and do benchmarks from there to determine which one is better.Reply

Your point being? Even looking at TSMC's 28nm process, Intel will still have quite an advantage with their 22nm process. ARM will only have an advantage for a few quarters with the 28nm process, then Intel will come out with their 22nm process. You also fail to acknowledge that Atom on 22nm (Silvermont) will a brand new Atom architecture, which you can bet will be a HUGE leap forward in performance and power efficiency.

TSMC is well known for having lots of trouble moving to new a process. Exophase, you should rephrase "right around the corner" to say in 1-2 quarters at the very least. It will still be a few months before we see any 28nm ARM phones actually on the market.

Intel has aligned their mobile and desktop process roadmaps, so all future Atoms will move to a new process node as fast as Intel's desktop chips.

Intel will also have a technological advantage as their 22nm process introduces FinFET, while TSMC won't have FinFET until their 14nm process.

Intel was really slow getting into the smartphone market, but now that they have their foot in the door, they will not let off the gas. Intel's efforts in the smartphone market will only accelerate from this point. Intel will attack ARM directly at the low-end power scale in this case, and ARM will struggle greatly at the high end as Intel's Haswell will offer revolutionary power/performance ratios. That's not even mentioning what power/performance ratios we will see from the the next-gen Atom design.

Also let me restate that this is Intel's *first step* into the smartphone market, and they are able to be very competitive with ARM designs. Reply

... my point being that by the time others have 28nm ARM SoCs - you know, in a couple months - Intel's 22nm Atom will still be a good year off, quite contrary to your original claim.. Did I actually need to type that?

It's not 1-2 quarters, and we know this because we're seeing Transformer Prime TF202 with Krait, not to mention the release of AMD's Southern Islands which is also on TSMC's 28nm process.

Of course it'll be a few months before we see Medfield phones on the market too: this article says Q2 for Chinese phones, which means 3+ months, and "by the end of the year" for something released from a decent global player. Not really uplifting schedules.

Of course Intel certainly may gain a much bigger process lead with Atom on 22nm and beyond, but your original comment was just wrong. That's all I'm saying.Reply